As the country prepares to think about the events of September 11, in these weeks before its one-year anniversary, everyone in the auto industry should learn some lessons. One of the most important is the need for intelligence that is timely and used. The United States intelligence failures that permitted the attacks on this
country are now slowly being addressed, but the mistakes made at the end of the Cold War cost this country a terrible price.
The fates of companies, as well as countries are tied to their intelligence capability. Guess what organization in the world, long before the Internet's arrival, was found to send half a million messages a day from just one country to its home base via satellite? The CIA? The Israelis? The Russians? Toyota? If you guessed Toyota, you would be right. As unlikely as it sounds, a CIA study in the late eighties found that Toyota sent over 500,000 messages a day from its Torrance, California facility to Tokyo via an encrypted satellite hookup. We know that our CIA sent about half as many messages around the world per day at that time, and although the Russian’s intelligence was still top notch in the early nineties, its infrastructure didn’t compare to that of Toyota’s.
“As unlikely as it sounds, a CIA study in the late eighties found that Toyota sent over 500,000 messages a day from its Torrance, California facility to Tokyo via an encrypted satellite hookup.”
Today, many intelligence experts believe that Toyota’s intelligence capabilities are still superior to those of the CIA, the Israelis or any global power. That’s because Toyota represents an organization filled with learners who share their knowledge.
